Youppi Club taking stilts into places where no stilts have gone before (with video)

Approximately 30 people sandwich themselves into a comer of Artissimo Coffee 'n’ Tea on George Street in the ByWard Market. Two performers on stilts float effortlessly above the crowd, helping the last few arrivals find a seat from their privileged vantage point. The performers hunch and duck to avoid a potentially nasty collision with the pipes on the ceiling.

Approximately 30 people sandwich themselves into a comer of Artissimo Coffee ‘n’ Tea on George Street in the ByWard Market. Two performers on stilts float effortlessly above the crowd, helping the last few arrivals find a seat from their privileged vantage point. The performers hunch and duck to avoid a potentially nasty collision with the pipes on the ceiling.

This is the inaugural meeting of the Youppi Club, hosted by the Ottawa Stilt Union. The Youppi Club aims to provide a night of fun and silliness through monthly pop up performances in venues that are specifically chosen for their non-theatrical nature, and their less than favourable conditions for stilt work and acrobatics.

Is it dangerous?

“Probably, but it’s part of the fun,” says Élise Gauthier with a laugh.

Gauthier has been a performer and member of the Ottawa Stilt Union since 2008. The OSU was formed after Laura Astwood put on a workshop at the University of Ottawa.

The attendees of the workshop were so taken with it that they went on to create a play called The Snow Show, which was performed at the NAC. With that show, the company followed soon after and was founded in 2007.

Gauthier explains that the idea for the OSU’s new Youppi Club is two fold. For one, the members of the stilt union were inspired by a show they did back in 2012 for subDevision, a festival, of sorts, that specializes in site-specific theatre in Ottawa.

For this performance, the OSU was assigned to a space in a church. Though the ceilings were high, the space was still very small. “The audience members were literally inches from our tricks,” Gauthier said. “People loved it and wanted to see more of it.”

The success of that show, combined with the consensus among the members of the OSU to have more fun and avoid creative stagnation, led to the idea of the Youppi Club.

“Last year, we had one big show that we worked on and it was fun, but it was a lot of work and a lot of money,” she says. “We thought it would be nice to have these pop up shows that don’t have too much preparation.”

The lack of preparation is intended to foster a feeling of mystery and improvisation for the audience (or club) members and performers alike.

“We want this to be an underground, exciting thing that no one wants to miss and only people who go will really know what happened,” says Gauthier.

From left to right, Laura Astwood, Gabrielle Lalonde, and Élise Gauthier prepare for a crowded pop up show at Artissimo Coffee n’ Tea in the market.

It’s for this reason that the plans for upcoming Youppi Club meetings are not disclosed in advance. Only the time, date and location will be posted on the OSU website, Twitter and Facebook.

The lack of information keeps both audience members and performers on their toes. The company doesn’t even know what is coming up for next month, which is all part of the fun.

However, if the first show is any indication, each meeting of the Youppi Club will include a short performance that involves a good deal of audience participation in addition to the fun of watching the performers interact with the space and each other to work around the stilts.

All this is accompanied by live music. In the recent show, accordionist Timothy Mott provided support and musical “ta da” type flourishes as a punch line to each trick or joke.

Though this was only the club’s inaugural meeting, it already seems to have the “good problem”, as Gauthier puts it, of being in need of a larger space — but not too much larger.

“We are purposely trying to find places which are not really appropriate for what we do,” says Gauthier. “There’s a pleasure in seeing performers make do with what they’ve got.”

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